Disclosure first: Charlene Li was my coauthor on Groundswell and my company now competes with hers.
I was impressed with this book. Charlene starts out with this thesis:
Open leadership is having the confidence and humility to give up the need to be in control while inspiring commitment from people to accomplish goals.
This is not just a paean to openness. First of all, Charlene makes the case that social technology gives customers and employees access to all sorts of power and information now, and more openness is the only response. And second, the book includes tools to help you, for example, assess your own level of openness and what your organization can tolerate.
I found some parts of the book a lot more useful or interesting than others. Here are three good parts.
1. Sandbox covenants. These are the rules organizations set up to determine what sorts of limits and conventions there are on openness. The book includes a link to social media policies of a bunch of corporations, not yet live, but I am looking forward to seeing that. This discussion, in Chapter 5, goes a long way to helping bridge the gap between social media backers within companies and corporate policymakers.
2. Organizational models for openness. Charlene describes three types of organization: organic, centralized, and coordinated, and shows when each one makes sense. Given all the questions I get these days about organization for social, this is quite relevant.
3. Leadership mindsets and traits. Chapter 7 classifies leaders according to whether they are optimistic or pessimistic, and whether they are independent or collaborative. Anyone who has ever had a boss will find this instructive. This is a fascinating way to look at leadership.
I did not love everything about this book. The biggest question in my mind is, who is the audience? CEOs can benefit, and there are leaders throughout organizations, but the challenge is for the millions of workers in the trenches in management, customer service, and elsewhere in companies. Transforming an organization to become more open is a huge task, and there is a lot here about what companies should do, but not enough about how to get there and how ordinary employees can participate.
I also experienced some confusion around the central idea of the book. If you are a social technology strategist or participant, this will read a lot like a book on social technology -- a sequel to Groundswell. At a recent event, I asked Charlene about how social relates to open, and she clarified that social creates the need to be open. But the book slips back and forth between the two concepts of social and openness without enough explicit attention to this difference.
If you are a social media wiz (that is, if you've already read Groundswell), you'll find the four objectives described here awfully similar to the the five objectives in Groundswell, and the concept of "socialgraphics" highly parallel to our Social Technographics. There are new cases studies in the sections on social technology, but some will seem very familiar to people who've been paying attention to the social world in the last two years.
In person and in this book, Charlene is one of the most upbeat and optimistic people I know. This is quite a contrast to the dark and sardonic side that I personally have, and the dynamic between those two poles made Groundswell better. Open Leadership is a relentlessly optimistic book for the most part. Even so, my favorite part was the chapter on failure, and how to embrace it and learn from it. Stories about failure inspire me. These were the best case studies in the book.
If you are a leader interested in how social technology affects your business, buy this book.
(In case you are wondering what is happening with Charlene's co-author, stay tuned -- my own book on the topic of how to run your company in the social era,
Empowered: Unleash Your Employees, Energize Your Customers, and Transform Your Business, is due out in September.)
About Author Charlene Li:
